Contact between Old Persian and Hebrew? A Rejoinder to A. Wilson-Wright

Abstract

Abstract In his recent article “From Persepolis to Jerusalem: A Reevaluation of Old Persian-Hebrew Contact in the Achaemenid Period”, Aren Wilson-Wright reexamines the list of proposed Persian loans in Biblical Hebrew as well as their distribution, specifically in relation to the distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew. He seeks to demonstrate direct contact between speakers of Old Persian and Hebrew and proposes two further Old Persian calques. This paper reevaluates Wilson-Wright’s proposals on both methodological and philological levels, and offers a fuller dataset for several phenomena. While allowing the principal distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew, questions of textual genesis and transmission are combined with sociolinguistic considerations to explore the possible ramifications of the proposed linguistic interaction: What do we know about the use of Old Persian apart from royal inscriptions? What do we know about Iranians, locals and their use of language in the Achaemenid administration? The result is a much more complex picture of multiple linguistic interference with many unknowns.